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      Tuesday briefing: What Trump’s response to the LA protests could mean for US democracy

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      Late last week, Los Angeles was left stunned as droves of federal US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers bore down on homes, businesses and neighbourhoods across the city in a series of immigration raids.The anti-ICE protests that followed were swift and furious, fuelled in part by the reported ill-treatment of some of the 118 people thought to have been detained, allegedly without judicial warrants. By Friday evening, thousands had taken to the streets in mostly peaceful protests before violence flared in points around the city, with protesters attacking police cars and blocking highways.Then came the response from the White House. President Donald Trump promised to crush the opposition on the LA streets, immediately and with military force, by using his powers to send 4,000 National Guard troops to the city.Yesterday, despite the protests dwindling and remaining largely peaceful, Trump continued to escalate the situation, branding the protesters “paid insurrectionists” with the administration ordering 700 marines into Los Angeles to support law enforcement in an exceptionally rare domestic deployment.California governor Gavin Newsom has called Trump’s response an “unmistakable step toward authoritarianism”, accusing him of intentionally causing chaos, terrorising communities and endangering democracy. Karen Bass, Los Angeles mayor, also warned that LA was being used by the Trump administration as a “test case for what happens when the federal government moves in and takes the authority away from the state or away from local government”.For today’s newsletter, I spoke with Philippe Sands, the renowned human rights lawyer, on what Trump’s response to the anti-immigration protests could mean for US democracy. That’s after the headlines.Five big stories

      Labour | All pensioners with an income of £35,000 or less a year will have the winter fuel payment restored in full, Rachel Reeves has announced, after weeks of uncertainty over the decision to make a U-turn on scrapping the benefit.

      Northern Ireland | Public disorder broke out in Ballymena in Northern Ireland, with police saying a number of missiles had been thrown towards officers after crowds gathered near the site of an alleged sexual assault in the town.

      Reform | Nigel Farage has demanded the reopening of domestic coalmines to provide fuel for new blast furnaces, arguing that Welsh people would happily return to mining if the pay was sufficiently high.

      AI | All civil servants in England and Wales will get practical training in how to use artificial intelligence to speed up their work from this autumn, the Guardian has learned. More than 400,000 civil servants will be informed of the training which is part of a drive to overhaul the civil service.

      Music | Sly Stone, the American musician who lit up generations of dancefloors with his gloriously funky and often socially conscious songwriting, has died aged 82. With his group Sly and the Family Stone, Stone tied together soul, psychedelic rock and gospel into fervent, uplifting songs, and became one of the key progenitors of the 1970s funk sound.
      In depth: ‘A slow creep towards normalisation’View image in fullscreenThe speed at which Trump deployed National Guard troops to quell the protests is a sign of just how willing the administration is to flex its power to the absolute constitutional limits.According to Philippe Sands, none of us should be surprised by the tactics deployed. Throughout his career, Sands has documented and examined the methods used by authoritarian regimes and military dictatorships.Sands says that the scenes unfolding in Los Angeles should be seen as part of a wider drive to create a sense of emergency, but also to test the limits of the public’s imagination about what is acceptable and what must be resisted.“People start in one place but very quickly events like we’re seeing in Los Angeles can change the parameters of tolerance,” he says.What are the LA protests about?Protests broke out across Los Angeles on Friday after agents from ICE conducted a series of high-profile immigration raids, which were met with horror by many locals. LA’s city council released a statement that the city, which was “built by immigrants and thrives because of immigrants” would not “abide by fear tactics to support extreme political agendas that aim to stoke fear and spark discord in our community.”Across the weekend, thousands joined anti-ICE demonstrations, with violence flaring at points across the city as police cars were attacked and highways blocked. The authorities responded with teargas and rubber bullets.What was Trump’s response?On Saturday, Trump said he was deploying 2,000 National Guard troops to clamp down on the immigration protests, posting on Truth Social: “These radical left protests, by instigators and often paid troublemakers, will not be tolerated.” Yesterday plans were announced to send 700 marines to LA, with the administration saying they were there to support law enforcement efforts.In sending troops, Trump bypassed the authority of the state’s governor Gavin Newsom, who said that the deployment was “purposefully inflammatory”.The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) called the images of truckloads of armed National Guard troops arriving in the city “akin to a declaration of war on all Californians”.How has Trump been able to deploy military personnel on to the streets of LA?It’s a central tenet of American democracy that the US military should not be used against its citizens. While the American constitution makes the president the commander-in-chief of all the armed forces, a set of constitutional and statutory legal constraints are intended to prevent the abuse of this exceptional power.However there are loopholes, which Trump has been open about his intention to exploit.First is the 18th-century Insurrection Act, which authorises the president to decide whether to use the military to engage in civilian law enforcement in certain situations. While he has labelled the protesters “insurrectionists”, Trump has stopped short of invoking the Insurrection Act in response to the protests in LA.Second is the National Guard. While the US president cannot command military forces against US citizens, he is in charge of the use of the National Guard in Washington DC and can request that other states provide additional guard troops to supplement deployments in emergencies.This weekend is not the first time the National Guard has been sent to Los Angeles. In 2020, troops used smoke canisters and rubber bullets to disperse Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters in Lafayette Square. In 1992, George HW Bush deployed thousands of troops to quell the riots after the police beating of Rodney King.Yet, significantly, this weekend is the first time since 1965 that a president has sent in the National Guard without being requested to do so by a state governor, something labelled an “outrageous overreach” by Newsom.Should this fuel fears Trump is driving the US towards authoritarianism?View image in fullscreenIn his first term as president, Trump was open about his desire to expand the powers of federal law enforcement and use the military to crush civil protest.Announcing the deployment of National Guard troops in 2020, Trump said: “If the city or state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residence, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them,” before reportedly advocating for BLM protesters to be shot.Sands is keen to stress we shouldn’t be jumping to hasty conclusions, “but it is obvious there are some warning signs that need to be taken seriously”.He draws parallel’s with Augusto Pinochet’s Plan Z, where the Chilean dictator concocted a narrative that leftist insurgents were planning a coup to justify violently suppressing dissent and attacking citizens. Now in the US, you have Trump talking about the “enemy within” to describe illegal immigrants and saying they are a threat to law and order. “It’s a very well-used playbook,” says Sands. “You use the power of your office to create a climate of fear, which then allows you to go further than you’d otherwise be able to do, to argue for exceptional circumstances.”At the same time, some say that in branding those protesting as a “mob” being paid to incite violence, the Trump administration is conflating resistance to his immigration policy with unlawful and dangerous behaviour that the administration claims state authorities can’t deal with. “You might say that what is going on in Los Angeles is a way of testing the limits of what the American people are willing to tolerate, whether in these circumstances they can stomach the sight of troops on the streets of a major American city,” says Sands.You only have to look at history to see how quickly such actions can become normalised, he adds. “It’s all part of this testing of the public’s capacity to absorb this alongside all the other stuff – banning books, taking people off the streets, deporting without due process. It is a slow creep that takes people past limits that were previously unimaginable.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIs this a turning point for US democracy?Sands says that although warning signs are there, the major difference between a case like Pinochet in Chile – the subject of his new book, 38 Londres Street – or other authoritarian regimes, is that so far the Trump administration has not limited – or not been able to limit – the role of the judiciary or the courts in holding the executive to account.“Judges and lawyers are being attacked, very publicly, but judges have not been removed from office and Congress has not curtailed the powers of the courts,” he says. “In the past it has been very clear that the role of the judges and the courts is the line that divides democracy and dictatorship. Authoritarian regimes such as the Pinochet dictatorship neutralised the courts almost immediately. In the US this hasn’t happened.”Sands says that Trump’s decision to bypass the state and directly deploy troops to LA will probably lead to a slew of legal challenges. Already the state of California has said it will sue the government accusing the US president of “unlawfully” federalizing the state’s national guard to quell the protests. “The courts and the judiciary’s powers have actually stood firm so far,” he says. “And on occasion we’ve seen the Trump administration blink and roll back when challenged.”However, he concedes that the jury is out on whether this will remain the case. “Judges in the United States are already under immense pressure,” Sands says. “President Trump’s administration seem to be pushing as far as they can, trying to create cracks and seeing how much they can bend that system.”As anti-ICE protests spread to other cities across the country, political, public and legal resistance that Trump will face in the coming days in LA could be crucial in determining just how resilient the checks and balances built into the US constitution are in face of the real onslaught that Trump 2.0 has unleashed.“There is a great deal at stake here,” says Sands. “Warts and all, since 1945 the United States has always seen itself as a beacon for the idea of the rule of law and constitutionalism. If it now descends into classic authoritarianism, the world will be very different.”What else we’ve been readingView image in fullscreen

      Oprah, Stanley Tucci and Selena Gomez love them – but just how safe are those supposedly “nontoxic” ceramic pans taking over your feed? Tom Perkins digs into the murky marketing behind the cookware boom, uncovering how a wellness aesthetic and vague labels are masking potential health risks. Sundus Abdi, newsletters team

      I loved this piece by Jon Harvey about how Jaws not only changed the film industry but also kickstarted a pathological fear of sharks that led to years of bloodshed and persecution. Thankfully, this seems to be turning and the most misunderstood of marine animals is having a cultural moment thanks to the dulcet tones of kiddie anthem Baby Shark. Annie

      Forget clubbing – people in Britain are now booking late-night dinner reservations instead. With restaurants staying open later and offering discounts for night-owls, a new night out has emerged. Sundus

      Chris Godfrey’s interview with Brad Dourif, who starred alongside Hollywood greats in many legendary movies (from Cuckoo’s Nest to Chucky) and became one of the most beloved of character actors of all time, is a great read. Annie

      From a darkly tender comedy about three siblings dodging social services (Just Act Normal) to a woman with terminal cancer chasing the perfect orgasm (Dying for Sex), this roundup of 2025’s the best TV is anything but predictable. Sundus
      SportView image in fullscreenFootball | Belgium raced to a three-goal lead inside half an hour, before Wales, rallied to equalise with the side ranked eighth in the world. A perfect Kevin De Bruyne cross in the 88th minute sealed the deal though, ending the match 4-3 and leaving Wales second in Group J in the World Cup qualifiers.Football | Tottenham have approached Brentford over appointing Thomas Frank as their new head coach. The Dane is the club’s No 1 target to replace Ange Postecoglou, who was sacked on Friday, and there is confidence that a deal will be struck in the next 48 hours.Rugby union | A leading executive at TNT Sports has dismissed the proposed R360 breakaway league as “delusional” while Premiership executives have played down the rebels’ threat, insisting rugby “doesn’t need pop-ups”.The front pagesView image in fullscreenThe Guardian leads with “Labour pledges £14bn for nuclear to get UK off ‘fossil fuel rollercoaster’”. The Telegraph follows the same story with “£14 billion for nuclear to keep the lights on”.The Financial Times has “Reeves retreat restores winter fuel payments to pensioners”, while the Times reports “Millions escape winter fuel cuts”. The Mirror characterises the move as “Winter wonderful”, but the Mail calls the chancellor’s comments on the matter “Deluded”. The Sun follows the story too, under the headline “It was fuelish so say sorry!” and the i reports “Winter fuel U-turn gets warm welcome – but Labour MPs warn Reeves: don’t make same mistake on disability benefits”.Today in FocusView image in fullscreenTrump, Musk and the end of a bromanceAndrew Roth details the explosive falling-out between Elon Musk and Donald Trump, and what it tells us about the future of the US presidency.Cartoon of the day | Ben JenningsView image in fullscreenThe UpsideA bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all badView image in fullscreenAt 67, Jean Walters (pictured above) heard church bells drifting through her garden in Meltham, West Yorkshire. On a whim, she decided to learn how to ring them. What began as a curious hobby turned into a passion. Within a few years, Walters joined the Yorkshire bellringers’ association and marked her 80th birthday by ringing eight different patterns – one for each decade of her life.A former soprano and teacher who lost her singing voice, Walters found a new way to express herself through bellringing. She says the physical and mental challenge of bellringing leaves her feeling exhilarated. “Its another way of expressing my joy of living.”Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every SundayBored at work?And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.

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      Trump announces $1,000 government-funded accounts for American babies

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      Donald Trump unveiled a federal program Monday providing $1,000 government-funded investment accounts for American babies, getting big time backing from top business leaders who plan to contribute billions more to an initiative tied to “the big beautiful bill”.At a White House roundtable with over a dozen CEOs, including from Uber, Goldman Sachs and Dell Technologies, Trump relayed the details of “Trump accounts” – tax-deferred investment accounts tracking stock market performance for children born between 2025 and 2029.“For every US citizen born after December 31, 2024, before January 1, 2029, the federal government will make a one-time contribution of $1,000 into a tax-deferred account that will track the overall stock market,” Trump said.The accounts will be controlled by guardians and allow additional private contributions up to $5,000 annually. Trump called it “a pro-family initiative that will help millions of Americans harness the strength of our economy to lift up the next generation”.CEOs from major companies including Michael Dell, Dara Khosrowshahi of Uber, David Solomon of Goldman Sachs, and Vladimir Tenev of Robinhood committed billions for employees’ children’s accounts. Trump praised the executives as “really the greatest business minds we have today” who are “committed to contributing millions of dollars to the Trump account”.Mike Johnson, the House speaker, also at the roundtable, championed the program, saying: “It’s a bold, transformative policy that gives every eligible American child a financial head start from day one. Republicans are proud to be the party we always have been. It supports life and families, prosperity and opportunity.”The program passed the House as part of a massive budget bill but faces stiffer Senate Republican resistance over the broader package. The accounts cannot be implemented as a standalone program and depend entirely on passage of what Trump calls the “one big, beautiful bill” that is “among the most important pieces of legislation in our country’s history”, claiming it’s “fully funded through targeted reforms” including welfare changes and a proposed remittance tax.However, the congressional budget office last week found the bill would also add $2.4tn to the national debt over the next decade while cutting Medicaid and food assistance programs. The CBO analysis showed the bill, which passed the House by a single vote and no Democratic support, would leave 10.9 million more Americans without healthcare by 2034.The treasury-funded accounts, previously called “Maga ccounts” resemble existing 529 college plans but with lower contribution limits – leading some financial advisers to say the Trump accounts may not offer the best investment incentives.The move is also not without precedent the United Kingdom operated a similar Child Trust Fund with government seed funding from 2002-2011 before discontinuing the program, while Singapore runs the Baby Bonus Scheme that includes government-matched savings accounts for children.Trump was optimistic about returns, saying beneficiaries would “really be getting a big jump on life, especially if we get a little bit lucky with some of the numbers and the economies into the future”.Johnson warned that failure to pass the legislation would result in “the largest tax increase in American history” and pushed for swift congressional action on what he called “pro-growth legislation” that would “help every single American”. More

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      Los Angeles protests: a visual guide to what happened on the streets

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      After a series of immigration raids across the city of Los Angeles on Friday inspired mostly peaceful protests involving a few hundred people, the situation escalated on Saturday when the US president, Donald Trump, took the unprecedented step of mobilizing the national guard – the country’s military reserve units – claiming the demonstrations amounted to “rebellion” against the authority of the US government. The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, called the decision “purposefully inflammatory”. Here’s a look at what actually happened on the streets.Most of the events took place in downtown Los Angeles, in a fairly localized area. The vast majority of the gigantic metropolis was not affected.Friday 6 June, morning. Federal immigration officers raid multiple locations across Los Angeles, including a Home Depot in Westlake; centers where day laborers gather looking for work; and the Ambiance clothing store in the fashion district. The Coalition of Humane Immigrant Rights (Chirla) says there are raids at seven sites.Friday 6 June, afternoon. David Huerta, the president of California’s biggest union, is arrested while apparently doing little more than standing and observing one of the immigration raids. Footage shows the 58-year-old head of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) being knocked down by a masked agent. He was taken to a hospital, then transferred to the Metropolitan detention center in downtown LA. “What happened to me is not about me; this is about something much bigger,” he says in a statement from the hospital. “This is about how we as a community stand together and resist the injustice that’s happening.” In a statement the US attorney Bill Essayli claims Huerta “deliberately obstructed their access by blocking their vehicle” and says he was arrested on suspicion of interfering with federal officers.Friday 6 June, afternoon. Demonstrators gather outside the federal detention center in downtown Los Angeles where Huerta and others are being held. There is a tense but largely non-violent standoff with police.7pm: The LAPD declares unlawful assembly in the area and deploys teargas to break up the crowd.8.20pm: The police force declares a city-wide tactical alert.Saturday 7 June, morning. As border patrol agents are seen gathering opposite another Home Depot location, this time in the largely Latino, working-class neighborhood of Paramount, news spreads on social media of another raid. A couple of hundred protesters gather outside the Paramount Business Center. Sheriff’s deputies block off a perimeter near the 710 Freeway and Hunsaker Ave.12pm. Border patrol vehicles leave the center, with officers firing teargas and flash grenades at protesters. Some follow the convoy of federal vehicles up Alondra Blvd, throwing rocks and other objects; a few others set up a roadblock near the Home Depot.Saturday 7 June, 4pm. The area near the Home Depot confrontation is declared an unlawful assembly and protesters are warned to leave. Approximately 100 people gather further west in the neighborhood of Compton, at the intersection of Atlantic Ave and Alondra Blvd, where three fires are set, including a vehicle in the middle of intersection. Rocks are thrown at LA county sheriff’s deputies, and officers retreat to the bottom of bridge to the east.7pm. The Trump administration announces it will deploy the national guard, claiming the limited protests were a “rebellion” against the US government. The California governor, Gavin Newsom, immediately denounces the move, the first time a US president has mobilized US military forces in a domestic political situation without the request of the state’s governor since 1965.The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, also announces that 500 marines at Camp Pendleton in California have been placed on high alert.Saturday 7 June, evening. Federal agents emerge in a phalanx from inside the Metropolitan detention center to confront approximately 100 protesters, firing teargas and “less lethal” weapons at them.9.30pm. Officers and vehicles force the crowd on Alondra Blvd back west, and by midnight most protesters have dispersed.Sunday 8 June, morning. After curfews are declared across LA county overnight from 6pm-6am, by Sunday morning about 300 national guard troops are deployed to the city. Two dozen appear to news crews outside the federal complex, as though intent only on posing for photographs.10.30am. Protesters begin congregating near the Metropolitan detention center, where national guard troops have arrived to support immigration officials – though they do not appear to be engaging in active policing.1pm. Thousands of protesters gather in downtown LA.Sunday 8 June, afternoon. The LAPD again declares the protest an unlawful assembly, ordering everyone to leave, but still the protests continue. Police patrol on horseback and report several arrests. Journalists and protesters are reportedly struck by projectiles, while LA police say two officers are injured after being struck by motorcyclists attempting to “breach a skirmish line”. Ice officers and other federal agents use teargas and pepper balls in an attempt to disperse the crowds. Throughout the afternoon, there are isolated episodes of vandalism – graffiti sprayed on buildings and vehicles, and a protester who damages the side mirror of a parked car. A line of spray-painted Waymo driverless cars, one with a smashed windshield, are later set on fire.Downtown Los AngelesSunday 8 June, afternoon. Hundreds of protesters block the 101 Freeway. They take over two lanes.Evening. Tensions have risen, with demonstrators throwing garbage and rocks at police. Newsom and the Los Angeles mayor, Karen Bass, double down on their plea to protesters to stay peaceful. “Protest is appropriate to do, but it is just not appropriate for there to be violence,” Bass says, while the LAPD chief, Jim McDonnell, calls the violence “disgusting” and says officers have been pelted with rocks, and shot at with commercial grade fireworks. Crucially, he notes that those engaging in violence were not among the people demonstrating against the immigration raids, but are “people who do this all the time”. More

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      Trump has unleashed something terrifying in the US – that even he may be powerless to control | Gaby Hinsliff

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      She was live on air to viewers back home, her TV microphone clearly in hand, when the rubber bullet hit her. The Australian reporter Lauren Tomasi was the second journalist after the British photographer Nick Stern to be shot with non-lethal rounds while covering protests in Los Angeles sparked by immigration raids. But she was the first to be caught on camera and beamed around the world. There’s no excuse for not knowing what the US is becoming, now that anyone can watch that clip online. Not when you can hear her scream and see the cameraman quickly swing away to film a panicking crowd.It was the scenario everyone feared when Donald Trump took office. Deportation hit squads descending on the kind of Democrat-voting communities who would feel morally bound to resist them, triggering the kind of violent confrontation that creates an excuse to send in national guard troops – and ultimately a showdown between federal and state power that could take US democracy to the brink. Now something like this may be unfolding in California, where the state governor, Gavin Newsom, has accused the president of trying to “manufacture a crisis” for his own ends and warned that any protester responding with violence is only playing into his hands. Suddenly, the idea that this presidency could ultimately end in civil conflict no longer seems quite so wildly overblown as it once did.Or to put it another way, Trump has got what he wanted, which is for everyone to switch channels: to stop gawping at his embarrassing fallout with Elon Musk over unfunded tax cuts, and flick over to the rival spectacle he has hastily created. After a brief interruption to scheduled programming, the great showman is back in control. But in the meantime, the world has learned something useful about who wins in a standoff between two giant egos, one of whom has all the money and the other of whom has all the executive power. In US oligarchies just as in Russian ones, it turns out, it’s presidents who still get to set the agenda.You can’t ride the tiger. That’s the lesson here: once populism has grasped the levers of power, even the richest man in the world cannot be sure of exploiting it for his own ends, or imposing his own agenda on the chaos. Not when a vengeful White House still has the power to destroy even the most powerful business empire, anyway. At the weekend, Musk meekly deleted explosive tweets about the president’s alleged relationship with the convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and by Monday he was loyally sharing Trumpian messages about the LA protests. His father, meanwhile, tactfully blamed the outburst on Musk Junior being “tired” after five months working round the clock for the White House.That ought to ring some bells on this side of the Atlantic. For oddly enough, it’s the same excuse offered up by Zia Yusuf, the millionaire businessman brought in to professionalise Reform UK’s perennially chaotic operation, who last week quit as chair in exasperation. Trying to get the party into power was no longer a “good use of his time”, he tweeted, after publicly clashing with its newest MP, Sarah Pochin, over her decision to ask a question in parliament about banning burqas (which isn’t officially Reform policy, or at least not yet). Yusuf, a British Muslim, has long been seen as Farage’s trusted bulwark against those inside Reform desperate to pick up where the jailed thug Stephen Yaxley-Lennon left off, and to become a full-blown, far-right anti-Islam movement.But this time, it seems, Yusuf may have bitten off more than the boss was ready to chew. A whole two days after storming out, Yusuf ended up storming awkwardly back in, telling the BBC that actually, having thought about it, he probably would ban burqas and other face coverings. He had just been exhausted, he suggested, after barely having a day off in 11 months. (If nothing else, it seems Reform really means what it says about fighting back against modern HR practices.)To be fair to him, even Farage seems to find the process of trying to control his parties exhausting at times, judging by the regularity with which he has taken breaks from them over the years. While Yusuf won’t return as chair, he will now join Reform’s so-called British Doge, supposedly taking a Musk-style chainsaw to council spending – which sounds like a breeze compared with managing Reform MPs. Until, that is, you reflect on how exactly Doge has turned out across the Atlantic.The reason parts of Silicon Valley were quietly enthusiastic about their fellow tech tycoon’s slash and burn approach to US bureaucracy was that they saw profitable method in the madness: a plan to hack the state back to the bare minimum, opening up new markets for digital services and unleashing (or so they hoped) a new wave of economic growth by slashing national debt.Five months on, however, it’s clear that any Doge savings will be utterly dwarfed by Trump’s forecast to send national debt soaring to uncharted and potentially unsustainable highs. Any tech titan hoping for the US equivalent of Margaret Thatcher on steroids, in other words, has ended up with Liz Truss after one too many espressos instead – plus troops on the streets of California and the slowly dawning realisation that, as the billionaire venture capitalist Michael Moritz put it, they have “no sway” over what they unleashed.There will be plenty of people back in Britain who couldn’t care less about obscure comings and goings in the Reform party, even as its poll lead means it’s starting to make the political weather. Others simply don’t expect it to affect their lives much either way if Reform permanently supplants a Conservative party from which it already seems hard to distinguish, and a few may already be calculating that they can turn its rise to their own advantage.Yet what the last few frightening days in the US have demonstrated is that once populism has its feet firmly enough under the table, chaos wins. There’s no ability to belatedly impose order, no house-training it either. All you can do is deny it a room in the house in the first place. In Britain, at least, it’s not too late for that.

      Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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      Trump’s ‘big, beautiful’ bill is built on falsehoods about low-income families | Brigid Schulte and Haley Swenson

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      As they race to deliver Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax bill, Republicans in Congress are using familiar tropes to justify massive cuts to the safety net that will leave millions of low-income children and families without healthcare or sufficient food. The programs, they argue, are rife with waste, fraud and abuse, and the people who use them just aren’t working hard enough. So work requirements are necessary to force the obviously lazy “able-bodied” people to get to work.Here’s the reality check: a majority of those receiving this aid who can work are already working. More than 70% of working-age people who receive nutrition benefits or Medicaid, the health insurance program for low-income children and adults that covers one in five Americans, are already working, according to the Government Accountability Office. Those who aren’t working, research shows, are mostly ill, disabled, caring for a family member, or in school.Take the story of Ruaa Sabek. When the Covid pandemic hit in 2020, she and her husband worked at a fast-food restaurant in Philadelphia. Both their hours were cut, but they didn’t qualify for unemployment benefits because they remained employed. With two young children at home, their carefully managed budget began to crumble under rising prices and reduced incomes.What saved them wasn’t extraordinary luck or family wealth. It was the streamlined and expanded government support programs that turned what economists predicted would be a financial apocalypse into a springboard toward financial stability for some families.One analysis of Medicaid work requirements by KKF, a health policy research organization, found that most working people with low enough incomes to qualify for Medicaid typically work for small companies or in sectors, like agriculture, that don’t offer employer-sponsored health insurance, or the rates are unaffordable. In other words, their jobs don’t pay them enough to afford basics, don’t offer benefits, and they have no other choice but Medicaid.There’s no doubt that safety net programs like Medicaid could be improved. They’re rife not so much with waste, fraud and abuse, as conservative lawmakers say – though there is some – but confusing red tape; disincentives to upward mobility, because benefits cut off sharply as soon as incomes start to rise; and cumbersome, punitive rules designed to dissuade people from applying for benefits in the first place.Fueling the Republican drive to slash public benefits is a long-held belief among many conservatives that the reason most people live in poverty is because they don’t work, or don’t work hard enough, and are instead lazing about, dependent on government largesse, and robbing Americans of their hard-earned tax dollars.That view features prominently in Project 2025, the playbook for the Trump administration authored by the conservative Heritage Foundation. The foreword reads: “Low-income communities are drowning in addiction and government dependence.”And it was clearly on display in recent House congressional hearings on how to slash $1.5 trillion from the federal budget in order to pay for extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. “That little gravy train is getting ready to run out,” one Republican lawmaker said of federal safety net programs like Medicaid and food and nutrition aid for people living in poverty. “The spigot is getting ready to be turned off.” The billionaire Elon Musk, charged with cutting federal spending, has even posted a meme calling people who rely on federal spending the “Parasite Class”.Here’s another reality check: Three in 10 Americans, more than 99 million people, rely on some form of federal aid to live. That includes nearly half of all children in the United States. Another 52 million households, 41% of all US households, make too much to qualify for public safety net benefits but still not enough to survive. Nearly 40% of Americans would struggle to cover a $400 emergency expense.There is a problem with making policy decisions based on the unfounded belief that poverty is about people with bad moral character making bad choices, or on debunked racial tropes of undeserving “welfare queens.” (In fact, white people make up the largest group receiving public food and healthcare aid.) Shaping policy around false stereotypes, rather than the complex reality, prevents policymakers from working together on real solutions.In fact, if you talk to people living in poverty, what they say they want tracks nearly exactly with what Project 2025 aims to foster: “empowering individuals to achieve economic independence.”“If I earn good money, I’m not going to be looking for benefits. I’ll take care of my bills,” said Blessing Aghayedo, a licensed practical nurse in Minnesota. Instead, she earns barely more than the federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009.Breathing roomIn the Sabeks’ case during the pandemic, expanded Medicaid and enhanced nutrition benefits helped weather health emergencies and soaring grocery prices. Rental assistance prevented them from losing their housing when they fell behind on payments. Stimulus checks and the expanded monthly child tax credit provided crucial cash that covered essential expenses like milk, diapers, children’s clothing, utility bills, and car repairs when they needed a new transmission.Perhaps most significantly, public subsidies for childcare and the Head Start program reduced their childcare expenses from an overwhelming $1,300 per month to $120, enabling Ruaa Sabek to continue working part time and enroll in a banking training program. “I feel like, ‘Oh my God, peace of mind,’” she said of the breathing room the public benefits gave her and her family. As a result, she landed a full-time position in 2023 as a personal banker that pays $45,000 annually with benefits – a dramatic improvement from her previous part-time $12-an-hour cashier job with irregular hours and no benefits.The family is now thriving without public assistance, aligning with decades of research. “You can’t actually figure out how to get to flourishing until you’re in a stable and secure situation,” said Megan Curran, director of policy at the Center on Poverty and Society Policy at Columbia.Research shows that when families have a stable foundation, they are healthier and live longer. Adults are more likely to keep working, and children are more likely to stay in school, graduate, get better jobs, and pay taxes as adults. Even babies’ brain development is improved.And the stability pays for itself: the Child Tax Credit, for instance, returns $10 for every $1 spent every year. The United States remains the only wealthy country with no national paid maternity leave, yet the return on investment for paid family leave is 20:1. For childcare, it’s 8:1.Meanwhile, rather than saving taxpayers a ton of money, as Musk promised, slashing safety-net support ignores the real problem that keeps families from economic independence: 44% of the workforce in the United States, the wealthiest country on earth as measured by GDP, is low-wage, a share far higher than in many economic peer countries.Squeezing families already struggling financially could increase the share of those already waking up hungry, homeless, or worried they soon might be. The United States already has one of the highest rates of child poverty among wealthy countries. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine estimates that high poverty rate costs as much as $1tn a year in lost adult productivity, increased crime and poor health.Childcare is keyIf lawmakers are serious about adding work requirements for safety net programs, then ensuring families have access to affordable childcare is critical. Compared with other advanced economies, the United States invests the least in childcare. That means childcare costs are second only to mortgage or rent for most families who have to pay out of pocket. And federal childcare subsidies for low-income parents come nowhere close to covering those eligible.The lack of affordable childcare sent Kiarica Schields, a college-educated hospice nurse and single parent in Georgia, spiraling into a cycle of joblessness, eviction, instability, and poverty. “Childcare. That’s my issue,” she said.Trump has said he wants families to have more children. Yet surveys show that young people aren’t having children, or having as many as they’d like, because they can’t afford childcare.Kel, a divorced parent of four, wants lawmakers to think of public benefits for families like hers as a short-term investment with long-term benefits. Kel, who asked not to use her last name, fled an abusive marriage, struggles to pay bills, though she works as much as she can, and relies on Medicaid for life-saving physical and mental health treatments for her and her children. “Lifting me and people like me up will have a cascading effect on so many lives in a positive way,” she said. “We will give back to our communities tenfold, a hundredfold. It’s worth that investment in us. We’re a really good investment.”

      Brigid Schulte is the director of New America’s work-family justice program, Better Life Lab, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, and the author of Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life and the New York Times bestselling Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play when No One has the Time. Haley Swenson is a research and writing fellow for the Better Life Lab More

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      ‘History will judge us as cowards or heroes’: Ras Baraka, the mayor arrested by Ice, won’t be intimidated

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      It took about two minutes for Ras Baraka to be propelled from being a relatively obscure New Jersey politician into a nationwide avatar. The transformation happened on 9 May when he was trying to inspect Delaney Hall, a privately run federal immigration detention center that he accuses of violating safety protocols, when he was arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).Video footage of those fateful minutes show burly Ice agents dressed in militarised fatigues dragging the mayor into the compound. Baraka, who was accompanying three congressmembers, has his hands yanked behind his back and is handcuffed.He vainly urges his captors to go easy on him with a plea that, in hindsight, now sounds deeply ironic. “I’m not resisting,” he says, over and over.Since the arrest Baraka, 55, has rapidly emerged on the national stage as someone who resists, a lot. The son of a revolutionary poet, and a poet in his own right, he was a high school principal before becoming councilmember then mayor of one of America’s less glamorous cities: Newark.He has articulated an opposition to Donald Trump’s march towards “authoritarianism” with a potency that, apart from sporadic actions, has been lacking from Democratic party leaders.“History will judge us in this moral moment,” he says. “These people are wrong. And it’s moments like this that will judge us all – as cowards or, you know, as heroes.”Following his arrest, Baraka was charged with trespassing, had his mugshot taken and was fingerprinted, twice. That second time really irked him. “That was a little much. Marshals came into the courtroom to carry me out to the basement, for charges that were a class C misdemeanor.”A few days later, Trump officials abruptly dropped the charges, earning themselves a sharp rebuke from the court. Judge André Espinosa slammed the Trump administration for having made a “worrisome misstep” in rushing to prosecute an elected representative.All of that took place in three weeks, at the same time as Baraka has been running in the Democratic primary to become New Jersey’s next governor. “It’s been a little crazy,” Baraka concedes, with understatement.The volatility has not ended with his court case, it has just moved onto the streets. Baraka says he is now frequently stopped by people on the Newark sidewalk, praising him for his stand.When he travels outside Newark, the obverse is true. “I’ve had every crazy person calling me all kinds of things. People jumping out of their car, yelling and screaming because you’re protecting immigrants.”View image in fullscreenFor Baraka, the praise and anger has underlined the perilousness of these times. “The country is really, really divided. And, in my mind, really uninformed. And we’re seeing how dangerous these people have become.”Now that he’s had time to reflect on this surreal episode, what does he think it was all about? Why did Trump’s America – “these people”, as he calls them – pick on him?“I’m the mayor of the city. That’s it. They’re coming after the governor, the US attorney, the judges. It’s all trying to prove that they’re in charge, like regular bullies do.”We meet 3 miles and a world away from Delaney Hall. The metal fences and khaki Ice uniforms that confronted Baraka on 9 May make way for a rather grander setting: the golden domed beaux-arts wonder that is Newark city hall.Baraka’s office is up a sweeping marble staircase. There are officers guarding his door, also uniformed, but instead of batons they greet visitors with smiles.The mayor sounds a bit flat when we start talking, as though his mind is elsewhere. But then, he has got a lot on his plate.A day after our interview he lodges a lawsuit against New Jersey’s top federal prosecutor for false arrest and malicious prosecution. The suit also accuses Alina Habba, Trump’s appointee as the state’s acting US attorney, of defaming him.On top of that, there are next Tuesday’s primary elections in the race to replace the term-limited Democratic incumbent, Phil Murphy, as New Jersey governor. Baraka is competing in a field of six Democratic candidates in what is turning out to be a tight contest: many polls suggest he is running in second place to the former navy helicopter pilot Mikie Sherrill, though the outcome remains unpredictable.Then there’s the fact that Trump has come at him with the entire might of the US government. It’s not just Baraka in the line of fire, it’s Newark.Trump has long shown disdain for Democratic-controlled cities, especially those that happen to be majority Black and brown. During his first term Trump called Baltimore, Maryland, which is 60% Black, a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess”.Newark, New Jersey’s largest city, is 47% Black and 37% Hispanic, so it’s fair to surmise where much of Trump’s animus towards it comes from. The president’s racist antagonism is targeted at Newark because of its status as a “sanctuary city” – meaning that it offers protections for undocumented immigrants, and limits the cooperation of its police with federal enforcement operations unless crime is involved.There’s no better manifestation of this collision of values than Delaney Hall. It’s 1,000 beds are only currently accommodating 120 detainees, but its presence on the edge of downtown makes its own looming statement.“It’s menacing, a threat,” Baraka says of the detention facility. “They said they were arresting criminals, but people know that’s not true. You can’t find 1,000 immigrant gang members and rapists and murderers, not in Newark. So who else are they going to put in there?”Baraka says that the fear is palpable across the city. Since Ice carried out a high-profile raid at Newark fish market just three days after the inauguration, there has been a steep decline in people leaving their homes for health or social service appointments, or trips to shops and restaurants.“People are afraid. It’s regular everyday anxiety. These people are running around, grabbing people off the street,” Baraka says.In the latest salvo, the Trump administration is suing Newark and three other New Jersey cities for “standing in the way” of federal immigration officers. That’s quite something, to have one of the world’s most powerful governments bearing down on you like a gigantic bird of prey.Is he scared? Baraka is surprisingly honest in admitting his own fears. “You got the apparatus of government, of law, of the police and military – all this stuff to make your life miserable.”He’s warming to his subject now, that early flatness giving way to an intensity of rhetoric clearly honed at campaign rallies. He comforts himself, he says, with the thought that people who came before him must also have been afraid, yet they were unbowed.“When we were fighting to dismantle Jim Crow in America, people were afraid. When the women’s suffrage movement was going, in the fight for labor rights, there was fear, but people still did what they thought was right.”He hopes he will make the same decision, though he candidly admits it’s not easy.“Of course, this is scary,” he says. “I just pray that it doesn’t turn me into a coward.”There are plenty of, if not cowards, then collaborators in this “moral moment”. Universities like Columbia or multibillion-dollar law firms like Paul Weiss, that have capitulated in the face of Trump’s assault without so much as a squeak of protest.Then there’s that other mayor ensconced just 15 miles away across the Hudson River. Eric Adams’s deal with Trump, in which the New York mayor had his federal corruption charges dropped in return for cooperation over immigration deportations, is perhaps the most shocking of all apparent quid pro quos in this second Trump era.Baraka is open about his ties to Adams, and though he stressed he didn’t agree with what had happened his take on events is slightly ambiguous. It sits somewhere between condemning the man and empathising with his plight.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Mayor Adams, I know him, he’s my friend,” he says.For Baraka, the Adams story is another sign of present dangers – not just in the Trump attack, but also in the Democratic response.“This is what this moment does to people, does to us – it puts us in these precarious situations where we have to choose ourselves over our people, over the things we believe or care about the most. That’s why these are very, very dangerous times.”He has a message for those who think they can save themselves by making a pact with the devil, such as Adams or Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic Michigan governor, whom he also namechecked. Whitmer has cozied up to Trump since his return to the White House, only to find the president now considering a pardon for the men who plotted to kidnap her.“That’s an insane proposition,” Baraka says. “You think you’re protecting yourself, but you’re just releasing your rights, your abilities, your values, and making yourself more vulnerable.”Baraka describes himself as an unabashed but pragmatic Democrat, a progressive who gets things done. “I’m a pragmatist at heart,” he says. “As mayor, I don’t have the luxury of debating ideology in the egg line at the supermarket. I’ve got to get people jobs and opportunity.”His record since he became mayor in 2014, succeeding Cory Booker who left city hall for the US Senate, has earned him the plaudits of such Democratic luminaries as Barack Obama. The former president praised Baraka in the New Yorker as being “both idealistic and practical”.Under Baraka, Newark homicides have fallen to lows not seen since the 1940s. He is proud of his record on attracting new businesses to the city, improving water quality and increasing childhood vaccinations.Yet in the gubernatorial race, he still faces the old put-down leveled at progressives: unelectability. He complains that during the campaign he has been labeled “too progressive, too Newark, and too Black”.“It’s hogwash,” he says animatedly. “The moderates, they want to keep the status quo and are maintaining these lies to make people do what’s safe, as opposed to what’s right.”Trump lost New Jersey last November by six percentage points. That was a 10-point improvement for him on 2020 – the second largest swing in his favour of any state.Baraka blames that startling result not on Trump’s appeal, but on the Democrats’ failings, especially in their pitch to working Americans. “The Democrats lost touch with people, that’s the real issue: the Democratic party’s ability to connect to its voter base and to attract new voters. Ultimately, they did not inspire.”He criticizes the party for being afraid of powerful interests. “People can’t pay their healthcare costs, but we’re afraid to challenge the healthcare industry; childcare costs are too high, but we’re afraid to lean into child tax credits that would end child poverty; rents and mortgages are unaffordable, but we’re afraid of developers and big banks.”His critique does not end there. Democratic leaders are also proving incapable of rising to the challenge of this perilous moment.“We’ve seen a bunch of disparate, spur-of-the-moment acts by individuals and smaller groups, but there’s no collective offensive strategy. And we’ve underestimated Donald Trump.”So why does he stick with it? Why stay in a Democratic party that he believes is abjectly failing?“It’s all we have right now. This is what we got. We got to fight with the weapons we have until there’s others. I mean, pragmatically.”Poetry is not the most conventional tactic in a bid for statewide office. One of Baraka’s closing political ads in the primaries has him reciting American Poem, his best-known work which is featured by Beyoncé in her current Cowboy Carter tour.Baraka argues that poetry can be a powerful tool in reaching out to voters. “There’s a lot of folks who respond to art, poetry, music. And I’m a poet. My dad said: ‘Never lose your poetry license.’ So I’m not.”View image in fullscreenHis dad was the prominent Black poet, playwright and jazz aficionado, Amiri Baraka (AKA Everett Leroy Jones AKA LeRoi Jones). Newark born and raised, Baraka Sr was a founding member of the 1960s Black Arts movement; he helped both to chronicle and shape the Black liberation struggle.Though a radical and at times a revolutionary, Amiri Baraka also worked within the system to promote Black politicians. He was seminal in having Kenneth Gibson elected in 1970 as the first Black mayor of Newark.It must have been a profound sadness for Baraka, then, that his father died in January 2014, four months before he himself won the mayoral election.“It was worse than that, I guess,” Baraka reflected. “My father didn’t want me to run for mayor at first – he knew how ugly this thing is. But in the last week or so of his life, he was passing out flyers in his hospital room, encouraging doctors, patients to vote for me. ‘My son’s running for mayor! My son’s running for mayor!’ Yeah, that was amazing.”American Poem is a call for an inclusive definition of America and what it is to be an American. “It’s me saying, I want to hear an American poem that talks about all the things – good or bad – that people refuse to talk about: our communities, our struggles, our lives, our culture, our history – all of which is as American as the KKK.”The poem was written in the 1990s, when Baraka was straight out of college. That’s uncanny, because it reads today with a burning contemporary urgency, as though it was composed as a direct riposte to Trump’s ideology of “America first”:
      I want to hear an American poem
      You know, something made in the USA
      Something American and Afro-Cuban
      Nuyorican Latin tinge, beaten bone by plena,
      Sprawling out of wide open tenement windows
      In the middle of winter
      Which just goes to show, Baraka says, that the current fight is nothing new. It’s as old as the country itself.“People keep trying to define what this country is. Now Trump is telling us what it is to be an American. But he can’t. It belongs to all of us. Yeah, it belongs to all of us.” More

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      Will the Trump-Musk rift really change anything? | Jan-Werner Müller

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      Thinking about the constant stream of news about Elon Musk, one is tempted to adapt two of the most famous sentences from American literature. William Faulkner wrote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” What comes to mind about Musk is: “He is not gone forever. He has not even left.”It is profoundly misleading to frame Musk’s departure this past week as “disappointed reformer quits after finding it impossible to make bureaucracy efficient”, just as it is wrong to think of this week’s rift as “Trump regime changes direction”. After all, Musk’s people are still there; and Musk-ism – understood as the wanton destruction of state capacity and cruel attacks on the poorest – will continue on … what’s the drug appropriate to mention here? Steroids? Not least, Trump’s and Musk’s fates remain entwined.Plenty of personnel beholden to Musk are still around and doubling down on their chainsaw massacre. Continuing deregulation is still very much to Musk’s and other oligarchs’ liking. There is no dearth of bizarre Musk pronouncements about the universe, but his claim that the Doge ethos is like Buddhism must be somewhere near the top. Yet it reveals a truth: the mentality of blissfully destroying state capacity will persist, except that the practice is likely to become more systematic and less prone to PR statements about “savings” that can easily be debunked. Russell Vought, who directs the office of management and budget, knows what he is doing and has long been preparing to use “executive tools” creatively – read: illegally, according to plenty of constitutional lawyers. The level of cruelty is not much different from Musk’s “feeding USAID into the wood chipper”, but the process may well become smoother and less visible.After all, Musk’s own criticism of the budget is that it did not cut enough. The most sycophantic members of the Trump cult – such as the representative Andy Ogles – say the same: the bill is “not beautiful yet”; only senators making further cuts can make it so. As one of the world’s most influential political scientists, Adam Przeworski, has pointed out, budgets like this do not get passed under democratic conditions unless there is a major crisis (juntas in Chile and Argentina could make cuts of a similar magnitude with impunity). The potential damage to low-income families – not to speak of science – is so enormous that Reagan and Thatcher look like democratic socialists by comparison.The Trump-Musk rift will reveal much about what kind of regime the Trumpists are really creating, and how far governing as a form of personal revenge might be pushed. In principle, mutual vulnerability remains. Trump still has reasons to welcome help from Musk’s platform – and his money. The US is relying on SpaceX and Starlink in ways that give Musk leverage. Conversely, though, no matter how big the platform, a state can always pull the plug through regulation. Most important, Musk and Trump might know things about one another that should not become public.This, after all, is the underlying logic of what the Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar has theorized as a “mafia state”. In such a state, benefits go to what Magyar calls a “political family” (in Trump’s case, it of course includes the biological family); but in return there has to be absolute loyalty and omertà. A mafia state resembles Hotel California: you can officially check out, but you can never leave.This does not mean that nobody ever tries. Yet in conflicts between autocrats and a defecting oligarch, the latter tends to lose. Putin subjugated oligarchs who showed streaks of independence; Orbán defeated his former ally Lajos Simicska. When the latter broke with the Hungarian prime minister in 2015, opposition figures were giddy with excitement about juicy revelations and regime infighting. But financing big PR campaigns about corruption and an anti-Orbán party, as well as a large media empire, were not enough; today, the former oligarch concentrates on farming in western Hungary.Many commentators have called for inflicting reputational damage on Musk. It clearly has been an advantage for those willing to protest the Trump regime that Tesla provided a focal point for concrete action; it is much more difficult to rally against cabinet members who do not happen to have a dealership down the road, but rather abstract things like hedge funds.More important still are investigations, starting with the simple – but still unanswered – questions about who actually runs Doge, how it is structured and on what legal basis its actions proceed (the fact that the chair of the Doge caucus in the House keeps touting the entity’s commitment to “turning transparency into action” only adds insult to injury). If Congress ever rediscovers Article 1 of the constitution, and its duties of oversight in particular, it should not just hold hearings, but produce an analytical record of how an individual – unelected and supposedly without holding any office – could simply be handed a chainsaw and a key to all our data (a golden key was indeed a fitting gift from Trump). It will be difficult – in some cases, impossible – to undo the damage Musk and allies have caused; it will take less effort to dismantle the myth of “if only a business genius ran government, all would be well”. After all, evidence of how things turned out will be there.

      Jan-Werner Müller is a Guardian US columnist and a professor of politics at Princeton University More

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      Trump travel ban barring citizens from 12 countries goes into effect

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      Donald Trump’s new ban on travel to the US by citizens of a dozen countries, mainly in Africa and the Middle East, went into effect at 12am ET on Monday, more than eight years after Trump’s first travel ban sparked chaos, confusion, and months of legal battles.The new proclamation, which Trump signed last week, “fully” restricts the nationals of Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen from entering the US. The entry of nationals of Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela will be partially restricted.Unlike Trump’s first travel ban in 2017, which initially targeted citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries and was criticized as an unconstitutional “Muslim ban”, the new ban is broader, and legal experts said they expect it to withstand legal challenges.The announcement of the new travel ban was greeted with less outrage and protest than his initial 2017 ban. On Monday, the new ban appeared to be overshadowed by Trump’s other immigration battles, including furious protests in Los Angeles over Trump’s deportation raids, which were followed by Trump deploying the national guard to the city despite the opposition of California’s governor.The newly instituted ban notably includes citizens of Haiti, a majority Christian country. Haitians in the US were demonized by Trump during his presidential campaign, with the president spreading the baseless conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating people’s pets.It also imposes heightened travel restrictions on citizens of Venezuela, who have been targeted repeatedly by the White House in recent months, as the Trump administration’s sudden deportation of Venezuelans in the US to a notorious prison in El Salvador sparked a massive legal battle.The ban is also expected to have a disproportionate effect on African countries, with some citizens of targeted countries worrying about being cut off from opportunities for education, professional development, and networking.Mikhail Nyamweya, a political and foreign affairs analyst, previously told the Guardian that the new travel bans and restrictions would “bring about a pattern of exclusion” and “may also institutionalise a perception of Africans as outsiders in the global order”.“This policy is not about national security – it is about sowing division and vilifying communities that are seeking safety and opportunity in the United States,” Abby Maxman, president of Oxfam America, a nonprofit international relief organization, said.While five of the countries on the new ban list are not majority-Muslim, including Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, Eritrea and Equatorial Guinea, as well as Haiti, the list does target citizens of non-white countries in the developing world, fueling criticisms that the ban is fundamentally racist and shaped by “bigotry”.Trump’s first travel ban, in 2017, was widely criticized as a fulfillment of Trump’s campaign pledge to institute “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”. The Trump administration later added citizens of other non-Muslim countries to the banned list.The new ban does not revoke visas previously issued to people from countries on the list, according to guidance issued Friday to all US diplomatic missions. However, unless an applicant meets narrow criteria for an exemption to the ban, his or her application will be rejected starting Monday. Travelers with previously issued visas should still be able to enter the US even after the ban takes effect.In a video posted Wednesday on social media, Trump said nationals of countries included in the ban pose “terrorism-related” and “public-safety” risks, as well as risks of overstaying their visas. He also said some of these countries had “deficient” screening and vetting or have historically refused to take back their citizens.Trump also tied the new ban to a recent attack in Boulder, Colorado that wounded a dozen people, saying it underscored the dangers posed by some visitors who overstay visas. US officials say the alleged perpetrator overstayed a tourist visa. The man charged in the attack is from Egypt, a country that is not on Trump’s restricted list.The Associated Press contributed reporting More